A Puzzle Inside a Riddle
"No Business Being President" was the 27th Special Comment delivered on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, airing on 31 January 2008. The Comment Finally, tonight as promised, a Special Comment of FISA and the telecoms. In a presidency of hypocrisy and administration of exploitation, a labyrinth of leadership in which every vital fact is a puzzle inside a riddle wrap in an enigma hidden under a claim of executive privilege supervised by an idiot. This one is surprisingly easy. President Bush has put protecting the telecom giants from the laws ahead of protecting you from the terrorist. He has demanded an extension of FISA law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. But only an extension that includes retroactive immunity for the telecoms who helped him spy on you. Congress has given him and he has today signed a 15-day extension, which simply kicks the time bomb down the field, which has change nothing of his insipid rhetoric in which he portrays the Democrats as soft on terror and getting in the way of his super human efforts to protect the nation. When, in fact and with bitter irony, if anybody is soft on terror right now, it is Mr. Bush. In the State of the Union address, sir, you told Congress, if you do not act by Friday, our ability to track terrorist threats will be weakened and our citizens will be in greater danger. Yet you are willing to weaken that ability. You will subject us, your citizens, to that radar danger. This Mr. Bush is simple enough even for you to understand. If Congress approves the new FISA act without telecom immunity, and sends it to your desk and you veto it, you by your own terms and your definitions. You will have just sided with the terrorists. You got to have this law or we're all going to die. But you might veto this law. It's bad enough, sir, that you are demanding an Expose Facto Law, which would clear the phone giants from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive, and blatant collaboration with your illegal and unjustified spying on Americans under this flimsy guides of looking for any terrorists who are stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass e-mail. But when you then demanded again during the State of the Union address, the Congress retroactively clear the Verizon's and AT&T's you wouldn't even confirm that they actually did anything for which they deserved to be cleared. The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America. Believed? Don't you know? Does the endless hair splitting of your presidential fine print extend even here? If you, sir, are asking Congress and us to join you in this shameless, breathless, literally textbook example of fascism, the merge efforts of government and corporation who answered to no government, you still don't have the guts to even say the telecom companies did assist you in your efforts? Will you and the equivocators who surround you like a cocoon never go on the record about anything, even the stuff you claim to believe in? Silly me. Of course Mr. Bush is going to say believe. Yes, it sounds dumber than if he had referred to himself as the alleged president or had said today is reportedly Thursday or acclaim mission accomplished in Iraq. But the moment he does say anything else, any doubt that the telecoms knowingly broke the laws out the window and with it, any chance that even the Republicans who are fighting this like they are trying to fend off terrorists using nothing but broke beer bottles and swear words could not consent to retroactively immunize corporate criminals, which is why the vice president probably shouldn't have phoned in to the Rush Limbaugh propaganda festival yesterday. Six sentence out of Mr. Cheney's mouth. The FISA bill is about, quote, retroactive liability protection for the company's that have worked with us and helped us prevent further attacks against the United States. Oops, Mr. Cheney is something of a loose cannon of course. But he kind of let the wrong cat out of the bag there. Because Mr. Bush and the corporations that he values more than people, did not want anybody to verify what Mark Klein says. Mark Klein is the AT&T whistle blower who appeared on this news cast last November who explained in a placid, dull terms of your local neighborhood IT desk, how he personally attached all of AT&T circuits, everything. Carrying every phone call, every e-mail, every bit of web browsing into a secure room, room number 641-A at the Folsom St. facility in San Francisco, where it was all copied so the government could look at it. Not some of it, not just the international part of it, certainly not just the stuff some, truly patriotic and telepathic spy might able to define have been sent or spoken by or to a terrorist, every thing. Every time you looked at a naked picture, every time you bid on eBay, every time you phoned in a donation to a Democrat, my thought was George Orwell's 1984, Mr. Klein told me, reflecting back and here I am, forced to connect the big brother machine. You know, Mr. Bush, if Mr. Klein's big brother machine, along the vice president conveniently just confirmed for us, if it wasn't any damn use at all at actually finding anything, you could probably program it to find out who started that slanderous e-mail about Barack Obama. Use room 641-A to identify that E-assassin, sir, and I'll stand up and applaud you. Yes, I'm holding my breath on that one too. But of course, sir, this isn't about finding that kind of needle in a haystack. This is not even about finding a haystack. This is about scooping up every piece of hay there ever was and laying the ground work for the next little job which you have to outsource to AT&T and Verizon and all the rest. It was your director of National Intelligence, Mr. McConnell, letting this one out of that same bag. The need for homeland security to stable off cyber attacks against the governments computer networks. And how do they do that, sir? By constantly monitoring the Internet. The whole internet. And who actually, physically does that, Mr. Bush? Right, the same telecom giants for whom you want immunity quickly, so quickly you wouldn't believe it. Because this previous domestic spying and this upcoming policing of the Internet, they may be completely evil, indiscriminate, unlawful and you have to dress it all up as something just the opposite. It isn't evil. It's you said to protect America. It isn't indiscriminate. You said it's the ability to monitor terrorist communications. It isn't unlawful. It's just the kind of perfectly legal thing for which you happen to need immunity. There's yet another level to this and here we move from big brother to sleazy son. Mr. Bush's new attorney-general Mr. Mukasey, the one who has already taken four different positions on waterboarding and who may yet tie that record on this subject of telecom immunity. He has a very personal stake in all this. There happens to be a partner in the law firm of Bracewell and Giuliani name, Mark Mukasey. Bracewell and Giuliani and the attorney general's son, Mark, just happens to represent Verizon. You know, Verizon, telecom giant. And all of a sudden, this is no longer just a farce in which protecting the telecom as dress up as protecting us from terrorist conference calls. Now, it begins to look like the bureaucrats in the third write, trying to protect the Krupp Family, industrial giants, by literally rewriting the laws of Germany for their benefit. And we know how that turned out. Alfred Krupp and 11 of his directors were convicted of war crimes at Nuremberg. And then the last, for those of us watching the president demanding this very specific law, the once that Germans had, it was called the Lex-Krupp. There is one surprising bit of comfort in all this. Clearly, Mr. Bush is at his hyperbolic worst here. Consider how his chief of staff, Andy Card, came on and scolded Chris Matthews in the after the State of the Union Address. The president's address tonight was very important, Card said, because it really was a sobering call to reality for us. And the reality is we have an enemy who wants to hurt us. The primary job of the president is to protect us. He talked about protecting us, he talked the needs to have the tools to protect us. Indeed, Mr. Bush. The primary job of any president is to protect us, not just those of us who own Internet and telephone companies, but all of us. And even you, sir, with your Internet and grasp of reality, even with your ego greater than 100 percent approval rating, even with your messianic petulance, even you could not truly choose to protect corporations instead of the people. I am not talking about ethics here. I am talking about blame. Even if it's you throwing out the baby with the bathwater, Mr. Bush, it still means we can safely conclude, there is no baby. There is not a choice of protecting the telecoms from prosecution, or protecting the people from terrorists, sir. There is a choice of protecting the telecoms from this prosecution or pretending to protect the people from terrorists. Sorry, Mr. Bush. The eavesdropping provisions of FISA have obviously had no impact on counter-terrorism and there is no current or perceived terrorist threat, the thwarting of which could hinge on an e-mail or a phone call that's going through room 641-A at AT&T in San Francisco next week or next month. Because if there were, Mr. Bush, and you were to, by your own hand, veto an extension of this eavesdropping, and some terrorist attack were to follow, you would not merely be guilty of siding with the terrorists, you would not merely be guilty of prioritizing the telecoms over the people, you would not merely be guilty of stupidity, you would not merely be guilty of treason, sir, but you would be personally, and eternally, responsible. And if there is one thing we know about you, Mr. Bush, one thing that you have proved time and time again under any and all circumstances, it is that you are never responsible. See Also Puzzle Inside a Riddle